Three contexts

For my purposes three different contexts for considering issues of media and mediation are relevant:
1. There is firstly the context of media and communication studies, in which media is linked specifically to the transmission of messages via an intermediary channel or means. Transmission is of course never quite the right word because it is quickly acknowledged that the intermediary plays a more active role. Rather than simply passing some distinct content from A to B, it frames and represents information, as well as describing a social relation in which A and B are fundamentally distant, fundamentally inaccessible to one another, in which information is only obtainable, only takes adequate shape, via the only every apparently compliant medial agency. This notion of media is fundamentally concerned with technical media, with media that acts as a prosthetic – that extends communication spatially and temporally via inhuman means.
2. Then there is the artistic concern with medium and media. Here rather than representing an alien, usurping force, the medium – the single medium – serves as a sensible ground for art making. Within modernity, the medium is a reassuringly material thing. It is an environment opposed to the abstraction and the flux of modernity. It is a place in which human experience can take pure and non-instrumental shape. Within this context, the media is not simply the plural of medium, but represents an antithetical force – a plurality that is confusing, that draws us away from the clarity of simple material constraints (Rosalind Krauss). In this sense, media are associated with precisely the alienated world of communication described in context 1 above.
3. Finally there is the more general sense of mediation that is not restricted to systems of communication or particular sets of material artistic means, but instead is implicit within being generally. This is the sense in which Hegel describes all determinate being as necessarily mediated – it takes coherent shape in terms of what it is not. Actually, we could describe a much longer philosophical history reaching back to at least the Pre-Socratics. Think, for instance, of Parmenides concept of the undivided unity of being and all the consequent dilemmas associated with denying altogether the possibility of non-being. Then of the many prior and subsequent Pre-Socratics who insisted upon a relational conception of being, in which the complexity of the world emerges from the dynamic interaction of simple elements. The problem of mediation has been in this sense vital to philosophy from the outset. This broader conception of mediation extends well beyond the contours of technical media, well beyond the character of art-making. It is a kind of anti-ontology, in which mediation emerges as a primary feature of being rather than a supplementary imposition (Derrida).